DEMOCRATIC CLOWN CAR UPDATE: Presidential Candidate John Delaney Has a Plan for America’s Young Adults. It’s Called Forced Labor.
Archive for 2019
July 30, 2019
RATS: “P.S. When Trump acquired the dilapidated building that became his first major real estate deal—the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street—he solved the building’s rat infestation during renovations by rounding up stray cats in New York City and moving them into the building. The rat infestation was eradicated quickly—without a government program!”
TIANANMEN II: PHOTOS: Hong Kong Protesters Embrace American Flag in Fight for Freedom. Next: The Goddess Of Liberty statue.
AS A MATTER OF FACT I am drunkblogging tonight’s Democratic nomination debate.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Democrat Prospects Are Bleak As The Wacky Pack Takes Over.
OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!
GULFSTREAM OWNERS AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING: A-listers flock to Google summit in private jets, mega yachts to talk climate change.
CONSTRUCTIVE CHANGE: Pro-Trump Activist Has Dozens Volunteering to Pick Up Trash in Baltimore. A friend comments: “Five seconds till they’re accused of racism for trying to clean up the city’s garbage.”
OUT: TESTOSTERONE POISONING. IN: ESTROGEN POISONING: High estrogen levels in the womb linked to autism risk.
TAX-SUPPORTED TERRORISM: UNC-Chapel Hill: A Sanctuary Campus for Antifa on the Taxpayer’s Dime. Antifa is Democrat muscle, so it’s not surprising that Democrat-controlled institutions give it sanctuary.
BRIAN ENO ON HIS FOR ALL MANKIND SOUNDTRACK: During the 1980s, former Houston Chronicle journalist Al Reinert somehow teamed up with U2/Talking Heads and ambient music producer Brian Eno to produce the impressionistic documentary For All Mankind. While it blended commentary from, and footage of, many of the astronauts of the Apollo missions, Reinert’s film was released in 1989, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the first manned moon landing. Unfortunately, Eno’s latest thoughts in the video below eventually devolve into enviro-doomsday mumbling, but along the way, it’s a fascinating look at how the country music the astronauts listened to on the way to the moon influenced the sound of his haunting soundtrack to Reinert’s documentary:
Here’s Siskel and Ebert discussing the documentary itself back in 1989, which, if you’ve never seen it, is well worth a look, particularly in HD streaming or the Criterion Collection’s Blu-Ray formats:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5PsE9s4Zzg
LAURENCE JARVIK: Rats! President Trump Exposes Baltimore’s Collapse.
I DUNNO, I HAVE SOME COLLEAGUES WHO ARE DOING THEIR BEST WORK AT THESE AGES: Law Profs’ Professional Decline Comes (Much) Sooner Than You Think: Age 50 In Scholarship, 70s In Teaching.
AT AMAZON, save in Storage and Organization.
JOEL KOTKIN: The Return To Serfdom.
Many working-class people have descended into what has been described as the “precariat,” a group of workers who have limited control over the length of their workday and often live on barely subsistence wages. Research reveals that 20 to 30 percent of the working-age population in the United States and the EU-15 (the 15 member states of the EU as of April 2004), or up to 162 million individuals, does such work.
Conditions for these workers represent a throwback to earlier times. In ultra-expensive places such as Silicon Valley, many conditional workers live in their cars. The typical Uber driver is not the one seen in ads, the middle-class driver picking up extra cash for a family vacation or to pay for a fancy date; most depend on their “gigs” for their livelihood. Nearly half of gig workers in California live under the poverty line. These workers often face a dismal future as they age; only one-third of independent contractors in the U.K., for example, have any sort of pension savings for their retirement.
Critically, the traditional bulwarks of working-class community — religious institutions, neighborhood and social groups, unions, and extended family — are all weakening. Marriages among the upper classes may be getting more stable and less likely to dissolve but take place later, as sociologist Stephanie Coontz has noted. But the situation is different among the middle and working classes; overall, as many as one-third of the births in the U.S. take place outside matrimony.
The decline of these institutions hasn’t happened on its own, but with a strong push from the upper classes.
Plus:
Like the revolutionaries of 1789, those in the contemporary French third estate (the commoners) have been stirred by the hypocrisy of their betters. In pre-revolutionary times, French aristocrats and top clerics preached Christian modesty while indulging in gluttony, sexual adventurism, and lavish spending. Today they call for working- and middle-class abstemiousness while they live large and exempt themselves by paying their modern version of “green” indulgences through carbon credits and other virtue-signaling devices.
We may be, as Tocqueville wrote in the 1840s, “sleeping on a volcano” destined to explode. The imposition of the Green New Deal proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — which would effectively mandate the end of many industries, from fossil fuels to aerospace to cattle ranching — would likely spark a mass rebellion in middle America. The “green” policies so appealing to a Silicon Valley billionaire, an investment banker, or a grant-seeking scientific researcher seem more like class warfare to residents of Youngstown, Ohio, the Ruhr in Germany, or, increasingly, China’s blue-collar cities.
Being held in contempt is bad. Being held in contempt by obvious hypocrites is worse.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Eleven-Year-Old Journalist Jaden Jefferson Is Impressed by Marianne Williamson.
Sheesh, Brooke, calm down. Not everybody lives in the same bubble as CNN. We Americans are out here learning about these candidates for ourselves and making our own decisions. As you might’ve noticed, we didn’t do what you wanted us to do in 2016. What makes you think we’re going to listen to you this time?
I’m on record as a big fan of Marianne, so this is welcome news. This kid gets it. Kudos to him for thinking for himself, and not just taking what’s spoon-fed to him by the hacks at CNN. The future just got a little bit brighter.
#WeStan4Marianne!
Heh. Read the whole thing.
ASSEMBLING THE SQUAD WAS ROGER STONE’S GREATEST POLITICAL DIRTY TRICK EVER: Ocasio-Cortez agrees with host calling Israeli Government “criminal” “white supremacist Jews.”
Also at the intersection of socialism, anti-Semitism and what Ted Cruz would call “New York values:”
THAT WOULD BE NICE: Ted Cruz Advocates Small Tax Change That Could Create 20K Jobs.
Problem: Vladimir’s family lived in Dnipro, Ukraine; Novokuznetzk is on the other side of the USSR, near the Mongolian border — a 17-hour flight.
But the family needed a toilet. So off dad went.
How did he get the toilet home? He lugged it onto the Aeroflot flight, and sat on the toilet all the way back to Dnipro. Though a small man, Vladimir’s dad wrestled the toilet up into their apartment and installed it. There it remains to this day.
A system that makes a man have to fly 17 hours one way to get a new toilet through back channel connections, then ride all the way back home sitting on top of that commode — that’s not a system that works.
Read the whole thing, knowing that AOC and her chief of staff would look at the above and think, “I only have two problems with this story:”
- Commercial aviation.
- Indoor plumbing.
Other than that, it’s a nice preview of the Green Nude Deal in action. As Glenn has written, “Under capitalism, the rich grow powerful. Under socialism, the powerful grow rich — and everyone else grows poor.” Don’t call it “growing poor,” simply say they suffered from an excess of unexpected bad luck.
TURNS OUT, TWITTER IS A TERRIBLE BAROMETER OF REAL-WORLD POPULARITY: The Twitter Primary Revisited for July 2019.